…and when you have some issues with how your younger self developed, stuff happens.

Consider David Foster Wallace as a professor of creative writing at Illinois State. From the recent bio:

In his undergraduate class, Wallace was kind to the clueless but cruel to anyone with pretensions. When a student claimed that her sentences were “pretty,” he scribbled lined from her manuscript on the blackboard and challenged, “Which of you thinks this is pretty? Is this pretty? And this?” He continued to battle any young man who reminded him of his younger self. When one student wowed his classmates with a voicy, ironic short story, he took him outside the classroom and told him he had “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before.” Wallace promised to prevent the “erection of an ego-machine” and strafed the student with criticism for the rest of the semester.

The “bootcamp” model of learning is on the rise–learning via a focused, intensive period of time dedicated to learning one thing.

I did a 10 day intensive meditation bootcamp. All meditation, all the time.

A friend recently completed a four day rationality bootcamp — where you learn and think about the meaning of rationality and how to become more rational yourself.

Another friend recently completed a 10 week Ruby on Rails bootcamp — where you intensively study the Ruby programming language and by the end are employable as a web developer.

Another friend recently completed the 10 week Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus — where you think deeply about how to change the world and network with the likeminded.

In all cases, you stop what you’re doing, travel to a place, surround yourself with teachers and students, and go deep on the topic. The upside to learning this way is obvious. It takes hours to get into creative flow. Deliberate practice — which is a structured way to learn something — requires sustained attention. In an always-on and distractible culture, the rare act of deep immersion can produce differentiated insights. At my meditation retreat, the deep, sustained focus mattered because it was only after 80 hours of continuous meditating where I was able to achieve some of the more profound insights. Had we done two hours a day over many weeks, I don’t think I would have ever reached the heights I did.

The downsides to the bootcamp approach are perhaps less obvious. One downside for me is what you might call “social marination.” I rely on my network to teach me things via ongoing conversation about an idea bouncing around in my head. I might read a book about something, blog about it, then talk to someone in my network, get emails from readers on the topic, then read another book, then perhaps listen to a speaker at a conference, etc. Over a multi-month period of time, consciously and unconsciously, I begin to crystalize lessons or insights. (Is another downside the idea of spaced repetition memorization?)

Formal schooling is the anti-bootcamp model. You study many different topics at once–it’s a constant balancing act. As David Brooks once noted, to be an excellent student you have to train yourself to not let yourself become too interested or immersed in any one thing. I should note that the liberal arts school Colorado College is an exception. There, you study one class per semester. It’s interesting more schools haven’t tried that model.

Finally, the bootcamp model of learning doesn’t have to be a formal class at a campus. Ryan Holiday suggests a bootcamp model to reading books. Interested in the civil war? Read 10 books on the topic in a row. Then pick a new topic. One topic at a time.

My questions in close: What are the skills that lend themselves particularly well to learning-via-bootcamp? Should a model for investing in yourself include attending bootcamps of this sort?

From this profile of Rahm Emanuel in the Atlantic, there’s this excellent nugget on how he’s reforming Chicago’s community colleges:

IN HIS 2006 book, The Plan, Rahm proposed that all Americans go to school for at least 14 years. Like Presidents Clinton and Obama, he has long seen community colleges as crucial to preparing the American workforce for global competition and to saving young people who would otherwise be condemned to poverty. But Chicago’s city colleges have become dysfunctional, with graduation rates a pathetic 7 percent. (Nationally, only 15 out of 35 community-college systems graduate more than 50 percent.) “We have 9.4 percent unemployment, 100,000 job openings, and I’m spending a couple hundred million dollars on job training,” Rahm tells me. He pauses to let the absurdity of this sink in. “So we are going to reorganize it.”

Rahm fired almost all the college presidents, hired replacements after a national search, and decreed that six of the seven city-run colleges would have a special concentration. Corporations pledging to hire graduates will have a big hand in designing and implementing curricula. “You’re not going for four years, and you’re not going for a Nobel Prize or a research breakthrough,” he says. “This is about dealing with the nursing shortage, the lab-tech shortage. Hotels and restaurants will take over the curriculum for culinary and hospitality training.” Already AAR, a company that has 600 job openings for welders and mechanics, is partnering with Olive-Harvey College; Northwestern Memorial Hospital is designing job training in health care for Malcolm X College. Equally important, the city colleges are overhauling their inadequate guidance services and contacting the 15,000 students most likely to drop out. As of March, all 120,000 students are being tracked, and those in danger of slipping through the cracks will be counseled. Thinking big, Rahm wants Chicago to be the national model for rescuing the middle class.

Makes a ton of sense. If a kid is in a community college trying get trained for work in a restaurant or a hotel, why the heck wouldn’t the potential employers of those students have their hands all over the curricula? Hopefully Rahm’s model inspires imitators.

A couple years ago I interviewed a few neuro-psychologists and learning experts to see if they could help me understand how I learn and process information. My thinking was, kids with learning disabilities submit to a battery of cognitive tests that supposedly reveal useful information about the way they learn. Could I do the same and find out more conclusively if I'm a visual learner or auditory learner? The experts told me that it was unlikely the tests would help someone who is fine and high functioning. So I passed.

According to recent research, though, the very idea of personal "learning styles"–an idea at the center of many education philosophies–may be false. In fact, we may all learn pretty much the same way. Here's more:

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity. Any experiment designed to test the learning-styles hypothesis would need to classify learners into categories and then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods, and the participants would need to take the same test at the end of the experiment. If there is truth to the idea that learning styles and teaching styles should mesh, then learners with a given style, say visual-spatial, should learn better with instruction that meshes with that style. The authors found that of the very large number of studies claiming to support the learning-styles hypothesis, very few used this type of research design.  Of those that did, some provided evidence flatly contradictory to this meshing hypothesis, and the few findings in line with the meshing idea did not assess popular learning-style schemes.

No less than 71 different models of learning styles have been proposed over the years. Most have no doubt been created with students’ best interests in mind, and to create more suitable environments for learning. But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim. Given the lack of scientific evidence, the authors argue that the currently widespread use of learning-style tests and teaching tools is a wasteful use of limited educational resources.

(hat tip: Josh Kaufman)

The theory behind outsourcing is that it enables specialization: you do one thing really well and let others do the rest.

Some of the more frustrating customer service experiences happen with entities where there's limited outsourcing and specialization. As I've written before, airlines do way too much. They market their brand and flight routes, they handle reservations and bookings, they maintain aircraft, they deal with luggage. More airlines should do as they do with their regional jet business: focus on something and outsource the rest. In the regional jet example, the big airlines handle reservations and ticketing and outsource the actual flying of planes.

City governments are another example. They try to manage parks, sewers, potholes, utilites, and more. Yes, a government entity, as the sole provider of police, fire, roads, and a few other things, will always be more diverse in scope than any sane for-profit corporation. But many governments still do too much beyond the core essentials, and are not able to do any one of these things very well.

One way to think about improving complex, ill-performing products, services, or experiences is to see whether there's a way to unbundle it and allow greater specialization. Arnold Kling applies this approach to improving higher education. Specifically, he thinks schools should separate the task of evaluating students' work from the task of teaching the concepts. Here's the background:

In the legacy education model, teachers combine coaching, feedback, and content delivery. By coaching I mean advice, guidance, and encouragement. Feedback includes formal grading as well as informal praise and criticism. Content delivery includes lectures and reading assignments.

Perhaps the key to radically changing education is to break up those functions.

1. The coach should be someone who knows the student well, who can relate to and motivate the student, who can recommend a good educational path, who takes account of the student's strengths and weaknesses, and who stays on top of how well the student is doing relative to the student's ability.

2. The formal feedback can come from strangers. Students can solve problems or write essays and have these graded by a separate service.

3. The content delivery should be "pulled" by the student rather than pushed by a teacher. For example, a student and a coach could agree that the student should learn statistics. The student then selects a statistics curriculum and works through it. The Khan Academy lectures on statistics are particularly good, in my opinion. But Carnegie-Mellon has a good on-line stats course, also. My guess is that, overall, there is enough content on line to obtain a world class education.

Then, Arnold writes:

A few months ago, Ben Casnocha wrote,

"Maybe 5-10% of high school high achievers should pursue higher education without attending a four year traditional college. This is the "Real Life University" option for entrepreneurial spirits. This is for folks who can learn a lot on their own, can assemble mentors and advisors to guide the process, and most of all find their creativity smothered by drudgery of school — or otherwise are on a trajectory higher than what college can offer — and therefore need an alternative path." 

His estimate of the percentage may be high, particularly in the near term. But that is the group that I wanted to aim at in my post on schools without classrooms.

Anyway, one important issue with alternative education models is interfacing with the legacy credential system. If you take a course from an alternative college, how can you get the credits to transfer to a traditional college or translate into a credible degree?

Arnold's proposed solution: A Means A.

A Means A solves the problem of credibility and comparability of grades in courses taught at different institutions of higher education. The innovation is to separate the grading process from other aspects of higher education. For any college-level course, A Means A will devise an appropriate exam and use independent professionals to grade the exam, according to transparent, standard criteria…

A Means A will extend the reliable, independent grading model of the AP exam to a broad spectrum of college-level courses. However, while the AP program compels instructors to "teach to the test," A Means A will "test to what you teach." That is, A Means A will take course objectives as given by instructors. It will design and grade tests that align with the objectives of the course.

It's a great thought. And it looks like one university is actually implementing part of it.

As a business opportunity, Arnold identifies the risks with A Means A, Inc. A company that promises to accomodate the idiosyncracies and variance of different schools' curriculua will have a hard time scaling the grading process in a cost-effective way. And making the credential have currency in marketplace in the early days will be tough. So while I am not so sure of the business opportunity, I think the high level prescription of unbundling is spot on. There are probably good business opportunties along these lines for education entrepreneurs–just need to brainstorm and iterate a bit more.

What Arnold has done with his A Means A post is bring to the table very specific ideas for improving the education system–not vague griping. And he aims his provocations directly at entrepreneurs–not policy wonks or politicans. A refreshing and useful approach.